When You Feel Like Giving Up

Everyone has their moments when the effort required for success seems overwhelming.  Making a healthful lifestyle change is no different.  Your perseverance will be tested from time to time, so your response to the challenges will determine success or failure.  As always, you are most likely to succeed if you know yourself and your personal defenses.

We all have characteristic responses to the threat of failure—some conscious, some unconscious, some adaptive and some maladaptive.   George E. Vaillant (2000) described the processes well and his work is the basis for this blog post.  He suggested that when we are threatened, we usually respond in one of three ways.  We find someone to help us, execute some deliberate coping strategy, or employ a non-conscious mechanism by default.  Let’s use as an example a cognitive-emotional healthful lifestyle change wherein we want to progress from a personal sense of intellectual stagnation to a sense of intellectual stimulation.    

Responses in the first category require us to find someone capable and willing to help.  The helper might be a partner who inspires us to learn a new skill or to explore a new subject.  Second category responses might include our deciding to find a setting, rather than a person per se, whose expressed purpose is to teach the new desired skill.

Whereas responses in the first two categories are consciously employed, ones in the third, default, category  just seem to happen.  These unconsciously determined responses more often than not are maladaptive, and result in our failing to achieve the desired goal.  For instance, even if you strongly would prefer to learn a specific new skill or subject for yourself, you could overcome intellectual boredom adaptively by unwittingly deciding to teach someone else a less desirable skill or subject that you already have mastered thoroughly.  Alternatively, you could handle your intellectual boredom maladaptively by randomly and mindlessly surfing the internet instead of pursuing a disciplined approach to mastering something specific.

When you have a goal in mind then, whether cognitive-emotional or otherwise, be aware of your characteristic tendency when overwhelmed by the effort.  Try your best to use the more reliable, deliberate, and adaptive strategies that enlist the support of capable others or that enable you independently to execute a deliberate coping strategy that is rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived.     

Reference:  Vaillant, George E.  Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology. American Psychologist, Vol 55(1), Jan 2000, 89-98.  doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.89